The defining wisecracker of the 1920s spent 17 years after her death as unclaimed ashes in a lawyer’s filing cabinet. This episode looks past the gin-soaked caricature to the real Dorothy Parker: a girl who lost her mother days before her fifth birthday and her stepmother at nine, who got expelled from Catholic school for treating doctrine as a punchline, and whose marriage to a stockbroker collapsed when he returned from the First World War traumatized and addicted.

We follow her from Vogue and Vanity Fair, where brutally honest theater reviews got her fired and Robert Benchley resigned in solidarity, to the Algonquin Round Table and the syndicated quips that made her the patron saint of the modern urban woman. We look at the New Yorker fiction that captured women waiting by the telephone, the O. Henry Award, the suicide verses that were not abstract, and the depression, alcoholism and abortion behind the polished wit. Then Hollywood: lucrative screenwriting with Alan Campbell, Academy Award nominations, money she compared to frozen snow, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, a 1,000-page FBI dossier, a denied wartime passport and the 1950 blacklist. The episode closes with her repudiation of the Round Table, the will that left everything to Martin Luther King Jr. and then the NAACP, and the long journey of her ashes to Baltimore and finally the Bronx in 2020.

• The disputed childhood and the armor of humor built against instability
• Getting fired for honesty as the birth of the Dorothy Parker brand
• Performative wit at lunch every day as an enabler of avoidance
• From Sacco and Vanzetti protests to organized anti-fascism in Hollywood
• Is her legacy the coffee-mug one-liners or the fight that cost her career?